]]>By: Hill60http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2013/02/06/the-doj-and-sp-payback-for-a-downgrade/comment-page-1/#comment-2266399
Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:34:13 +0000http://hotair.com/headlines/?p=241689#comment-2266399That’s a mighty nice company you have there… it would be a shame for us to have to shut it down.

Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson once commented: “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants…..“ Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man and then searching the law books…. to pin some offense on him.” In short, prosecutors’ discretion to charge – or not to charge – individuals with crimes is a tremendous power, amplified by the huge number of laws on the books….

As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person – Mother Teresa, or John Lennon -­ and decide how they could be prosecuted….:

The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time….”

The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character. And since, as Wu’s game illustrates, everyone is a criminal if prosecutors look hard enough, they’re guaranteed to find something eventually.

We saw the same thing with Sheldon Adelson after he decided to spend money to defeat Obama last year; all of a sudden he’s being investigated. And we had Obama, in 2009, wasn’t it, issuing veiled threats to sick the IRS on people who annoyed him.